A NEW chart has recently made its appearance in the pop music press, alongside ‘Disco’, ‘Reggae’ and the rest.

It bears the heading ‘Futurist’ and lists the weekly fortunes of records in a style fast growing in popularity and self-confidence. Like all such labels, the Futurist tag is just a handy marketing term, but its very existence points to the fact that the popular music industry has identified a size-able movement among its clientele.

Leading Futurist bands include Spandau Ballet, Visage, Ultravox and Landscape, and the element which unites them and defines their style is their bold and imaginative use of the latest in musical technology – synthesisers, computers, electronic gadgets in general. With remarkable assurance these young musicians have grasped the ever-expanding possibilities which the new technology offers and created an expressive and graceful musical language.

Landscape’s new album, From the Tea-Rooms of Mars …(RCA LP 5003), is a case in point. Although nearly every sound is produced by a gadget – or processed through one – the effect is not at all mechanical. On the contrary, most of the pieces have the warm and intimate feel of ‘live’ music.

The great danger with electronic music lies in its endless possibilities. Unhampered by the limits of ordinary instrumental technique, the musician is easily tempted to go on forever fiddling with the knobs, like a child with a kaleidoscope. Before long he finds that the instrument is playing him. Landscape and the others never let this happen. They know what they’re after before they start.

But movements in pop music usually involve more than the music itself. The Futurists (also characterised as New Romantics) are moving spirits in a whole new cult which started a little over a year ago in a few small London clubs and which takes in fashion, dance styles and all the usual paraphernalia. The quickest way to describe what it looks like is to say that it is ‘anti-punk’. Clothes are neat, with a tendency towards spaceman jump-suits, and fans dress up, instead of dressing down, to go out for the evening.

Richard Burgess, a member of Landscape and producer of Spandau Ballet’s hit records, is at the centre of the scene and he describes it as optimistic – more like the early Sixties than the late Seventies. The two words which keep cropping up in his conversation are ‘style’ and ‘originality’.

‘The important thing is to hang on to your originality, to keep developing,’ he says. ‘The idea isn’t to set up a style for other people to copy. If you do that, you’ll get caught and marketed and turned into a commodity. Look at the way punk became fossilised in the space of a few months.’

The aim, as Burgess puts it, is to make music which is both enjoyable and imaginative, ‘at once surprising and familiar,’ and thus encourage others to exercise their own originality.